Durango and Silverton Railroad

Happy Sunday!  Just a quick post today.  This is an Oil Painting of the narrow gauge Train in Durango Colorado above the Las Animas River.  The train is well worth the trip to Durango and is part of the history of the country and its mining days.

Giraffes - three color exercise

To follow the thread of ways to improve your painting capabilities which I have been blogging on for the past couple of days, this painting is an example of using three colors or a restricted palate to paint.  This oil painting was done with Titanium White, Raw Umber, and Cobalt Blue.  The use of just three colors allows you to focus on the values, i.e. the dark, medium, and light.  Too many colors can be confusing and can distract you from what you want to paint.  Not getting the values right can cause your painting to lose it's ability to represent three dimensions while painting in two.  This is part of the many problems and struggles in the life long pursuit of learning to paint.  This exercise to improve is similar to  the toned paper drawings a wrote about in the post from yesterday.

More techniques to improve

Another technique to improve your abilities in painting and art is to use toned paper, white chalk, and a colored pencil.  In this case I used a sepia pencil for the color.  The toned paper gives you a mid-range and you get to work to get the darker tones and you can use the white to represent your highlights.  To the right I have drawn a practice exercise of a human skull and an eyeball situated in the eye socket.

Sepia House Plants

I have been drawing and painting for my entire life.  Mostly not real seriously but at times of stress I pick it back up again.  I did this back in 1990, after returning from the Mideast.  I had previously tried to jump back into painting after a six year gap.  I naively assumed I could start back at the level I had stopped at previously.  Well the painting was a failure.  In frustration I realized I needed to return to the fundamentals, i.e. drawing.  So I started to work through a series of practice drawing exercises.  One was to use the Sepia pencil and I drew the house plant.  I liked the shapes and spaces between the leaves.  Part of the learning to see is to observe the shapes but also to observe the negative spaces i.e. the spaces between the leaves.  You can compare this to some of the more recent drawings I have posted and you can see the benefit of practice and hard work as I can see the improvements. It is like music, to maintain you have do practice a lot just to maintain your skill level.

Colored Pencil - Landscape

This is a colored pencil landscape I did a few years back.   This is a western Virginia scene.  If you get to visit the Shenandoah Valley, do it.  It's a great long picturesque valley.

More Experiments

This is a simple two color oil sketch of Aspen trees.  It is small 6 x 8 inch sketch and was quickly done to capture the essence of the trees.  I try to do a couple of these a week to improve and practice.  Most are disposable but the improve meant comes with time and repetition.

Experimentation

To track on yesterday's post, another way to improve is to experiment with techniques, brushes, a limited palette of say two colors.  Get art books and read the authors theories and try his or her techniques.  Most are fairly similar and consistent with a high recommendation for repeated practice.  Above is a two color, white and burnt umber oil on canvas paper.  Not all of these work but I liked this one and I stopped before I screwed it up by over working it.